4 Answers

You can buy one share of stock at most any broker, however the commission may make the price prohibitive. For example, if you were to buy one share at $20, some brokers have a minimum commission of $30 making the total price $50 for your share. Although you may eventually make a profit the first $30 of upside would be recovering the commission.

There are some discount brokers with less expensive commissions. A do it yourself account is usually the answer. In my opinion the best and easiest is to go to www.capitalone.com360 and open an account. They will let you buy for $4 commission and I might mention they also pay the best rates on savings accounts that I have found with no fees, checking is a great deal too. Check them out and see what you think.

I used to use Share Builder. The nice thing was that you could buy partial shares. So say you wanted to buy 50 bucks a month of Apple you would pool your monthly with others and buy on a weekly interval. So you might get a tenth of a share but they sorted that out on there end. But they were bought by ING and then Capital One so I got the fuck out pretty fast. The fees used to be a lot more reasonable.

Back when I was in college I would say take a hundred out of my bank account a month and put 50% in Apple, 25% in Level 3 and another 25% in QQQ. Their fee back then was like 4 bucks a month. But I have moved on.